Forum for medical students - a wordpress and discourse site (praise and showcase)

I have been running a forum for medical students in Denmark since 2001 - as a non-commercial and sparetime project. The last 10+ years I have been a medical doctor - but I still want to have a place for medical students and comming students - where they can debate.

I have been all the way around starting with phpBB2, later phpBB3 for a short periode of time. Then I went to Joomla with Kunena as the forum.

In november 2017 I merged to Discourse. I have been a happy user ever since.

The new site
Now I have taken it a level up and added a wordpress installation on top of the Discourse forum. I did move the forum from the main domain to a subdomain. And did move from vultr to digitaloceans. I use 2 droplets: One ubuntu 18.04 5$ droplet for Discourse (forum.studmed.dk) and one openlitespeed wordpress 5$ droplet for studmed.dk

I was able to code the wordpress integration myself - and I have shared the code.

Im a little proud But it was only possible due to Discourse and the json support! Thanks.

Showcase
I use the ColorMag Theme by Themegrill - the free edition.

The top block show articles from wordpress

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While the lower blocks is based on the forum categories and each block is a widget (it is the code I have made)

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For every forum post you can see likes and number of comments.

The comment feature for wordpress articles is Discourse, not wordpress comments. I really like that option. Its is neat! Thanks again Team!

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Thanks! Keep up the good work!

Links:
Main site: https://studmed.dk
Forum: https://forum.studmed.dk
The wordpress theme I use is the free colormag theme for wordpress by themegrill
My plugin wordpress plugin: https://github.com/frold/Colormag-Wordpress-Theme-Discourse-Widget
Post about the plugin; Colormag Wordpress Theme Discourse Widget

I was thinking of doing something similar, only for nursing. I liked the structure of old forums like Xenforo, PHPBB. Do you think Discourse is better? The topics seem endless. In the old forum style, there are permanent categories, people post new topics in the categories.

Discourse seems to be a large texting topics, people can reply to the same topic. Like Facebook without the graphics.

Was this a concern for you before you chose disocurse?

You can reign in loose topics by making categories… and even sub-categories within them. People can post new topics in the categories and/or subcategories. Once your forum has been well underway, you can also “refine” the categories and/or sub-categories by year (or x-month) increments to keep the topic lists from getting too long. This also keeps topics more closely related in categories/sub-categories.
Two other ways are to use Groups and/or Tags.

Coming from another forum that used Discourse, we decided to stick with Discourse and eventually used Sub-categories. So far it’s working well for us.
You should decide what you want your forum to look like topic-wise, and decide which way to go to keep topic lists short(er).

Thank you Jim. I want to I stall it and play with it locally first.

Check out try.discourse.org as well if you’re just getting your feet wet!